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Installing Slackware Linux 9.1

Slackware Linux 9.1 is out so I wrote a tutorial on installing it. This is a step by step install help, so if you want print it out.

How to install Slackware Linux 9.1.

Written by: gore.

Slackware Linux has reputation for being hard to install. I disagree with this. I have installed Slackware about 20 times now, and I have yet to use a book or manual. I think what catches most people off guard is the fact that the Slackware installation is in text.

Free BSD and Debian Linux are also text based installs. Don’t let this stop you though, just because it is text does not mean it is hard. In this tutorial, I will be assuming a few things; First, I will NOT be partitioning so that Windows will be on the same disk. The install makes you partition for Slackware anyway, so if you can do this, you should be able to partition a Windows PC without any problems.

I will assume you will be using the PC for Slackware Linux only. And that you can boot from a CD-ROM drive. If you cannot boot from a CD-ROM, then make boot floppies, the install will look the same and you will have to do the same things during the install anyway.

Let’s begin:

Insert the Slackware Linux CD-ROM into the CD-ROM drive of the machine you are installing on and turn it off. Wait a few seconds and then turn the machine on. You will see some text coming up and asking you to type something at a boot: prompt.

Most people can safely ignore this and just hit ENTER on your keyboard. After this point you will see various lines of text scrolling and then you will come to a prompt asking for you to enter a keyboard map.

If you are using a US keyboard, just ignore this and hit enter. If you need to enter another keyboard map, or want a real challenge, press the 1 key on your number pad and hit ENTER.

After that screen you come to another prompt asking you to log in as root. Just type root and press enter. The root password is a random string of numbers and letters during the install. After logging in as root, you come to a command line.

Most people at this point are probably thinking “what the hell is this bullshit?” well, at this prompt, type cfdisk and hit the ENTER key.

After you are in cfdisk you will see all partitions on your HD. Use the left and right arrow keys to select options at the bottom of the screen, and the up and down arrow keys to select partitions.

If you have only one partition on the disk, hit the left arrow key, the hit enter to delete it. If you have two partitions, do the same and then hit the down arrow key to select the second partition, hit the right arrow key so highlight delete, and hit the ENTER key.

You should now have nothing but free space showing. Hit the right arrow key and press enter to create a new partition. Press the right arrow key again and select Logical and press enter. This is going to be your swap space, so enter in how many MB you want it too be.

The box I am installing on has 384 MB of RAM and I am making a swap space 1001 MB in size. After you type in how many MB you want, press enter. You should now see another option asking for “Beginning End Cancel” It auto highlights on beginning and that is what we want. So just hit enter. Putting swap at the beginning of your HD is good because it’s usually the faster part and therefore makes a good swap space.

After you hit enter, you should be back at where we started partitioning. Press the down arrow key and select the free space. Hit the right arrow key and press enter to create a new partition. This time, we are going to select Primary as the option. It also reselects this option so just press enter.

For size in MB I am going to just press enter because it lists how many MB you have left on the disk by default. Now you are back at the same screen again. By using the up and down arrow keys, highlight the logical partition we made first, and then hit the right arrow key until “Type” is highlighted. It is about 6 times you hot the arrow key until you get to the option “Type”.

After you have it highlighted, press enter. Press any key and it should say “Enter file system type” and it has 82 listed already, so press enter here. 82 is the swap space file system type. You are now returned to the menu again. Press the down arrow key and highlight the other partition. The one that is NOT listed as swap is what we want to highlight.

After you have highlighted the non swap partition, press the right arrow key 6 times. You should have “Type” highlighted again. Press enter when you have highlighted “Type” at the bottom of the screen.

You are now back at the screen saying press a key to continue. Press a key. Now for this part, you are NOT going to use 82 as the file system type. Type 83 as the file system type and press enter.

You are now back at the main cfdisk screen again. Press enter again to make the Linux partition bootable.

You see Boot appear near it.

Now, press the right arrow key 8 times to highlight “Write” on the bottom of the screen and press enter.

The computer will beep at you which scares the **** out of newbies.

You see the message designed to make Slackware only installed by Linux gurus. And a warning saying it can destroy data on your disk. Since we are formatting it and installing only slack, this message means jack ****.

Now, type Yes exactly as I did. You have to type yes with a capitol Y or it will bitch and say “No, type Yes”. So just save yourself a minute of laughing and type “Yes”.

After pressing enter it will beep as it writes all of this to the partition table of your HD. Then it will beep again when it is done.

Now you should be back at the cfdisk main screen again. Press the right arrow key 5 times to highlight “Quit” and press enter.

You are now back at a command prompt. You should see:

root@slackware:/#

At this command prompt, type setup and hit the enter key.

Root@slackware:/# setup

Your screen gets as graphical as it is going to get during this install.

You see numerous options.

Press the down arrow key 2 times to highlight add swap and press enter.

You come to another screen with more options. It will say Slackware has detected a swap partition:

Aren’t you glad we made that swap file?

It will ask if you want to install this as your swap partition. Press enter as it is already highlighted on “Yes”.

It formats the swap partition and checks for bad blocks. Go get yourself some coffee as this will take a few minutes even on fast systems.

After it finishes it goes to the next screen saying your swap has been configured. Press enter.

Now your at another screen. You see your Linux partition we made in the cfdisk program. Press enter on this screen to “Select” it.

After pressing enter, you are taken to a screen with a few options. Using the up and down arrow keys will navigate you through all of this. You can just press enter here and do a quick format, or you can select Check, and allow it to check the entire disk for bad blocks.

Do NOT select No.

Choose whatever the hell you want here. If your in a hurry or just want this to end, select format. If you have time to kill and or want your disk checked for bad blocks, select Check. After selecting which option you want to go with, press enter to actually select them. After you choose which option you are going with, you see another screen asking for the file system to use.

If you’re an old school user you will probably be choosing ext2, if you are like me, you will be choosing either ext3 or reiserfs because I like my file system to be a journaling file system.

The main differences in these 3 file systems are:

Ext2: an old file system that has been around for quite a while. Ext2 became less important as journaling file systems came to be. Journaling file systems allow fast recovery, Ext2 does not. But, Ext2 has been around for a number of years, and has undergone a lot of tests and improvements, making it fairly stable and reliable. Also, Ext2 allows easy upgrading to Ext3.

Ext3: Ext3 file system was based on Ext2, so a lot of things have carried over. Ext3 however is a journaling file system, so it allows fast recovery and so on. Ext3 is a good file system with good performance.

I selected ReiserFS here. After you select and press enter, it formats the file system, and then takes you to another screen. Just press enter here. It is just a page saying it added this to /etc/fstab.

Now you select where to install Slackware from. Since I am using a CD-ROM, I press enter with the number 1 highlighted.

After pressing enter, you come to another screen. Just press enter with “auto” selected. You come to another screen where it scans for the Slackware install media. After this, you are taken to a screen to select software you want to install.

Use the up and down arrow keys to move around, and press SPACEBAR to select or unselect options. Most of the reselected options should be left alone as some are system files you need.

After you have selected what you want there, press enter.

You are taken to a new screen where you can select what you want here. If you want everything, press enter. This will install everything and is fairly easy to finish up with.

I am gore however. So I am selecting expert.

After selecting expert, you are taken to more screen that’s allow you to select individual packages.

Using the up and down arrow keys again, select the software you would like to install, using the SPACEBAR key to select and deselect software. Again, most of the pre selected things should be left alone.

Something things, like PCMCIA may be unselected as I am not installing this on a laptop. After you have selected the software you want, press enter. After you have pressed enter, you are taken to another similar screen to select more software.

Select whatever you want too add in this category of software and press enter. After you press enter, you are brought to yet another screen of software selection. After you have selected the software you want in this screen, press enter.

After pressing enter, you are brought to a smaller screen to select some versions of Emacs. Besides the ones already selected, I recommend you select “Emacs-nox”. This will allow you to run Emacs without having X loaded.

After you have selected what you want here, press enter.

After pressing enter, you are brought to an even smaller selection screen. These are help documents, just press enter as they are useful and should be kept.

After pressing enter, you are brought to an even smaller selection screen. This allows you to select the Linux source. You probably should leave this here too unless you are installing on an incredibly small HD.

Press enter when finished with this screen. After pressing enter, you are brought to a bigger software selection screen. These are libraries and should be left alone. Press enter.

After pressing enter you are brought to a similar screen to select networking programs. I recommend selecting fetch mail so you can check your email without loading X, and Nmap.

After you have selected what you want in here, press enter.

After pressing enter, you are brought to another screen for software selection. Unless you are a publisher I don’t think you’ll need to select much here, just press enter.

After pressing enter, you are brought to another software selection screen. Most of this you wont need to add either. So you can safely leave this screen alone and press enter.

After pressing enter, you are brought to another software selection screen. This is for Xfree86. Don’t unselect any of this unless you don’t plan in running X at all.

After you have finished with this screen, press enter. After pressing enter, you are brought to another screen for more software.

These are X applications. If you are not going to use a GUI, you wont need any of this, but most people will probably want a GUI, so don’t deselect any of this unless you are not running X.

After you have made your selections, press enter so you can be dragged through another damned screen of selection. Don’t worry though, this one is short. Just press enter unless you are tight on disk size.

If you have a little disk, you don’t NEED these, so you can deselect it =)

After pressing enter, you finally can stop selecting packages while the ones we just spent the last 20 minutes selecting are installed.

During this time, feel free to get coffee as it can take a while. Or you could wire money to me.

After a while your CD-ROM drive will open and ask for the second CD-ROM. Slackware 9.1 was the first Slackware to have 2 CD-ROMs. So grab the second CD-ROM and stick it in.

After you have stuck the second CD-ROM in, press enter.

After pressing enter you are brought to another software selection. After selecting the GNOME packages you want, press enter so you can be pushed into another software selection screen for KDE.

After selecting those packages, press enter again. After pressing enter, the software you just selected will be installed.

After they install, you are taken to a new screen to install the Linux kernel. If you installed like I did with a CD-ROM, just select CD-ROM, which should already be selected, and press enter.

If you used a boot disk, select that.

After pressing enter, you are taken to another page to choose the kernel. The one that is already selected, /cdrom/kernels/bare.I/bzImage, should be fine, so just press enter. After you press enter, it installs the kernel and then takes you to another screen.

If you want to make a boot disk, press enter. If you don’t, press the down arrow key and then press the right arrow key to select skip this, and then press enter.

After pressing enter, you select your modem. I don’t have a modem installed on this computer because it is hooked up to my LAN using a NIC. So for this screen, I will be selecting no modem.

If you have a modem, select it. After you press enter, you are taken to a screen to enable hot plugging. Yes is already selected, so just press enter.

After you press enter, you are taken to a screen where you select how to install LILO. Simple is already selected here, and this usually works fine, so just press enter.

After you press enter, you are taken to a screen where the console settings are chosen. For this, I am selecting 1024x768x256. This should work fine on most machines, but if you are installing on older hardware, select the one at the top named standard.

After selecting one, press enter. You are then taken to another screen to pass parameters to the kernel. You usually won’t need this so just press enter.

After pressing enter, you select where to install LILO. If you are dual booting, or using a boot manager, select Root, if you want to have to use a floppy for extra physical security, select floppy, if you are like me and not doing any of that, select MBR by pressing the down arrow key 2 times, and then pressing enter.

After pressing enter, you are taken to a screen to select a mouse.

Select your mouse and press enter.

After selecting a mouse, you are taken to another screen. Just press enter here as this can be a useful feature.

After pressing enter, you are taken to a screen to configure your network. If you have DSL or Cable, you probably want to do this now. If you have dial up, you probably wont need this.

Select yes or no and press enter. If you selected yes to configure the net, you are taken to a screen for a host name. Unless your installing this on a server or something where a lot of people will be accessing the machine, you can just make something up. If you are installing on a server, enter the hostname.

After entering a host name, press enter. After pressing enter, you enter the domain name. Again, you can pretty much make up whatever the hell you want here. Unless of course you are installing on a server as said before.

If you are installing on a server, enter the required information, and press enter. After you press enter, you are taken to a screen where you can set up how you get an IP. Since I have a LAN, I select DHCP. After you make your selection, press enter.

After pressing enter, you come to another screen asking for networking information. Unless you have an ISP run by nazis you can just press enter. After pressing enter, you will be shown your networking information. If it looks good, press enter, if it doesn’t, press the right arrow key to highlight “No”, and press enter.

If you selected “No”, you will be taken back through the networking set up. If you selected yes, you are taken to an area where you select what services to run. Unless people need to access your machine remotely, deselect SSHd at the very bottom. Sendmail is ok though. That way you can send mail from a command line.

After selecting what services to run, press enter. After pressing enter, you are asked if you would like to try custom screen fonts. “No” is already reselected here, so press enter, unless you really want to try screen fonts out.’

After pressing enter, you are taken to another damned screen. Unless you are sure, press enter. “No” is already highlighted here, and is a safe option.

You are now taken to a screen to select your time zone. I live in Michigan, so I am going to select “US/MICHIGAN”. After you highlight your time zone, press enter. After pressing enter, you are asked to select which Window Manager to run by default. Select whichever one you want and press enter. After pressing enter, you are taken to another screen telling you how you haven’t chosen a root password yet.

Select yes here, and press enter. After pressing enter, you see a prompt to enter a password. This is going to be your root password. Don’t use anything you can find in a dictionary, or something someone would be able to guess. Make it hard to remember for everyone except you.

After you enter it, you have to enter it again to be sure you didn’t **** up any spelling. After you enter the password, it changes and you can now press enter like the prompt is telling you to do.

Now you are at a screen that should have you almost hugging me; The set up is complete screen. Press enter here. After pressing enter, you are taken back to that set up main screen. Use the down arrow key to highlight exit, and press enter.

You see a message saying installation of Slackware is complete, and your CD-ROM tray opens up and spits out the CD-ROM. Put the CD-ROMs away and close your CD-ROM drive. You are now at a command prompt again.

Really good tutorial I was actually thinking of installing one of the many different distros of Linux on a laptop that I am purchasing in the summer as a personal gift. :-) After reading your tutorial I learned some more. Since I have been slowly learning and understanding how linux works.

I was wondering gore how much of a difference is the process to when you are installing Slackware on a Laptop as compare to a desktop computer ? I pretty aware that laptops dont have as much space when it comes to hard drives and all and that there are other factors that come into play. But do you think that you could write a tutorial or point me to some good sites that provide info on how to go about installing Slackware Linux on a Laptop ? Or can you purchase Laptops that come pre-installed with it already ? [ Even though I would prefer giving it a shot doing it my self.]

X (the gui) is usually the tricky thing with laptops. linux laptops is very handy http://www.linux-laptop.net/ and with older laptops i have had good success putting the model and linux into google, as there are so many people before who have spent the time playing with different X configurations/settings.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
The international ban against torturing prisoners of war does not necessarily apply to suspects detained in America\'s war on terror, Attorney General John Ashcroft told a Senate oversight committee
-- true colors revealed, a brown shirt and jackboots

*GRRRRRRRRRRRR i went to post this but it had too many smilies and when I hit the back button of course my post was gone ... I think that something should be done about this. maybe a button that says edit your post.... on my way over to suggestions*

Anyways... as I had nice last time very nice dude

I am anti-slack (have been since like slack 3 or 4) but if I ever decide to reinstall i'll definately follow your tutorial.

The only thing you are lacking is props to your proof-reader for all his hardworking reading it through before you posted it hahhaa....

Anyways nice work bro.. Peace!

IT Blog: .:Computer Defense:.PnCHd (Pronounced Pinched): Acronym - Point 'n Click Hacked. As in: "That website was pinched" or "The skiddie pinched my computer because I forgot to patch".

Originally posted here by HTRegz *GRRRRRRRRRRRR i went to post this but it had too many smilies and when I hit the back button of course my post was gone ... I think that something should be done about this. maybe a button that says edit your post.... on my way over to suggestions*

Anyways... as I had nice last time very nice dude

I am anti-slack (have been since like slack 3 or 4) but if I ever decide to reinstall i'll definately follow your tutorial.

The only thing you are lacking is props to your proof-reader for all his hardworking reading it through before you posted it hahhaa....

Anyways nice work bro.. Peace!

HAHA. Yes, thank you HT for reading this when it was written up to the swap point and giving me feedback lololol. I never knew you were anto slack. Don't like it? Or some other reason?

Congrats , gore nice tut, i took the liberty of sending a copy of your tut to a friend i hope you don't mind.

I dunno why..... don't have a real reason, just remember the old version and that I didn't like it... prolly because I tried it as a young n00bie cracker.. hehe.. I should really give it another chance. but I love MDK too much to ever make a switch..... I'm just waiting.. another week or so and we get to set up a debian beowulf cluster... I'm pumped.....

btw I'm collecting boxes.. anyone that wants to send me on old box I'm turning my living room into a server room.. I'm going to create a beowulf cluster of old boxes, prolly running debian. My goal is to have it up and running @ some point in january. It'll be on my 3mbps DSL line and i'll be giving access to it to anyone who contributes as incentive to donate hehe Anyways.. that's my plug..

Peace

PS.

Thanks for the props. haha!

IT Blog: .:Computer Defense:.PnCHd (Pronounced Pinched): Acronym - Point 'n Click Hacked. As in: "That website was pinched" or "The skiddie pinched my computer because I forgot to patch".